SIOUX FALLS S.D. (KELO) — City councilors will discuss a new child care report put together a Sioux Falls law firm one year after a similar report was presented.
The 20-page report from Woods Fuller law firm regarding potential options for the future of child care has been posted on the city’s website and will be discussed during an informational meeting Tuesday.
The report comes after city councilors approved paying $75,000 to Woods Fuller in May to help address the ongoing child care crisis within Sioux Falls.
Woods Fuller said they are currently working on three objectives regarding child care in Sioux Falls, the first of which is to identify regulatory changes or economic incentives that will create 3-5 in-home child care options each year.
The report concludes “based on exhaustive research and analysis, the options in this report are those with the highest likelihood to succeed when weighed against time, effort, and cost. Woods Fuller is offering these recommendations as a first step but will continue to work with the city and community partners.”
“The City of Sioux Falls is wise to be proactive in attempting to increase the number of family day care homes in our community,” the report says.
Create office for child care solutions
The one recommendation that the report showcased that would address the largest number of provider needs, is the city hosting a Staffed Family Child Care Network (SFCCN) or Shared Services Alliance (SSA).
A SFCCN is a network of providers that share the cost of both business and pedagogical leadership, with the common goal of increasing earnings, sustainability, quality, and working conditions among participating home-based businesses.
An alternative to an SFCCN would be a Shared Services Alliance (SSA). In an SSA, “multiple
childcare providers share resources to create both sustainable operations and
quality programming. This pooling of resources provides access to a wider array of tools,
services, and expertise than providers can access as individual operators.
A similar conclusion was reached back in June 2023 with a report from the Sioux Falls Child Care Collaborative, regarding having an official office guiding child care and youth development.
Sioux Falls Thrive President, Michelle Erpenbach said in a meeting with city council members last year that a child and youth development office is needed at the local level.
“There are lots of possibilities,” Erpenbach said. “It could be a city-county collaboration, it could be a city-economic development collaboration. It might just sit in an economic development office. The whole point is that we all need to be part of this conversation.”
The goal would be to partner with outside organizations such as Lutheran Social Services, Sioux Falls Childcare Collaborative, Sioux Empire United Way, and EmBe to reduce isolation and stress on individual providers and give them access to a team of both business and pedagogical experts.
The SFCCN would then designate an organization to provide constant staffing to provide some of the key services to the members.
Creating more in-home day cares
According to the report the purpose of Objective 1 is to help create new in-home child care providers. Woods Fuller said they looked at several of the main reasons why in-home providers have closed or failed to launch in the last decade to discover what the roadblocks are to child care.
According to the report, the biggest barriers to enrolling more children were staffing, capacity limits, and families’ ability to pay. Staffing challenges are based predominantly on low wages, lack of benefits and high turnover rates.
“Unlike at the local level in Sioux Falls, state law allows the operation of an unregistered FDCH if no public money is received by the provider. Unregistered FDCHs are not subject to most requirements under state statutes. There is no similar concept in Sioux Falls and it is illegal to operate an FDCH locally without registration and compliance with all municipal ordinances,” the report says.
Some possible regulatory changes suggested are tax credits for the city portion of property and sales taxes for family day cares, amendments to zoning and child care ordinances to allow commercial spaces to operate family day care homes and increasing the ratios for school-aged children during summer and other breaks.
The report says 31% of South Dakota families who needed child care unable to find openings as of 2019. In 2021, Sioux Falls data showed there were an estimated 11,876 children in need of child care and only 9,723 available licensed child care slots.
The number one barrier for employees when finding child care. According to recent data, the average cost of child care in Sioux Falls is around $239 per week for center-based care and $150 per week for in home child care. The median household income in Sioux Falls is $66,761 while the average child care tuition per child is $11,385 per year.
Another roadblock child care providers face is turnover and an inability to hire staff with the main contributors being low wages for child care jobs, and child care jobs not offering employee benefits. The report stated that child care workers are in the bottom 2% of pay across all occupations nationally. The mean hourly wage for child care workers in Sioux Falls as of May 2022 was $12.34 which is lower than almost every single listed occupation for Sioux Falls.
The report stated that as of 2022 it was estimated that a lack of child care leads to nearly $150 million in economic damage per year.
